Abstract
Internet gaming disorder is characterized by a severely reduced control over gaming, resulting in an increasing gaming time and leading to negative consequences in many aspects of the individual life: personal, family, social, occupational and other relevant areas of functioning (World Health Organization). In the last years, the significant boom in using video games has been raising health issues that remain insufficiently understood. The extent of this phenomenon (the estimated prevalence is between 1.7 and 10% of the general population) has led the mentioned Organization to include gaming disorders in the list of mental health conditions (2018). Several studies show converging findings that highlight the common brain activities between substance use disorders and behavioral addictions (i.e., gaming disorders). Addiction specialists observed that addict subjects tend to confuse pleasure with happiness when linking emotional states to their addictive activities. As far as we know, beyond the mentioned observations, distinguishing the perception of these two emotional states in the frame of an addiction has not been yet the object of formal research. This study aims at examining the possible confusion between pleasure and happiness within the addiction sphere. Video game addiction has been chosen to explore the possible occurrence of this perceptional distortion. A mixed design lab-based study was carried out to compare between video games addicts and non-addicts (between-subjects), and video games-related activities and neutral activities (within-subject). Emotional reactions were gauged by self-reported scales and physiological data acquired through a range of biosensors: Relaxation and Hearth Rate. From a therapeutic standpoint, this research intends to explore alternatives to deal with this sort of disorders. More specifically, at the cognitive level, the idea is elaborating guidelines to develop patients’ insights into these emotional states and thus increasing their ability to handle them. Overall, several indices resulting from this study constitute a bundle of arguments that argue in favor of the confusion between pleasure and happiness made by addict users when associating their affective states to video gaming. Furthermore, this approach illustrates how reappraising emotions may contribute to reducing the perceptional distortion of these emotional states.
Highlights
In the last years, the significant boom in using video games (VG) has been raising health issues that remain insufficiently understood (Khazaal et al, 2016)
This study aims at examining the possible confusion between pleasure and happiness within the addiction sphere
The internal coherence obtained between the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (OHQ) and the “Happiness and VG” items within the “Pleasure and/or Happiness and VG” questionnaire was quite high for the four items concerned
Summary
The significant boom in using video games (VG) has been raising health issues that remain insufficiently understood (Khazaal et al, 2016). The World Health Organization [WHO] (2018) has recently included “gaming disorders” in the list of mental health conditions. The fifth revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) considers the ‘Internet Gaming Disorder’ as a potential new diagnosis that requires further research (Petry et al, 2015). The prevalence of problematic gaming is estimated to range from 1.7% to over 10% among general population (Griffiths et al, 2012). Compared to the core topics of research in neuroscience such as stress, depression, etc., the chronic use of VG is a rather recent field of investigation. Several research projects have been exploring VG addiction from a behavioral, emotional, brain circuits and genetic perspectives (Griffiths et al, 2012; Dong et al, 2017)
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